This invention concerns cooling of tap dispensed beverages and particularly beer flowing from a keg.
Beer kegs are commonly used to serve beer at large gatherings, and involve pressurizing the keg with CO2 gas and dispensing the beer from a tap connected to the keg. Cooling the beer is necessary for proper enjoyment but also to avoid excessive foaming of the bear at the tap which can interfere with dispensing of the liquid beer, resulting in wastage since the foam must be discarded.
Beer kegs are usually refrigerated and delivered cold, but, particularly in the summer time, the beer in the keg soon warms up enough that excessive foaming is a common problem.
It has heretofore been proposed to cool the beer just prior to reaching the tap by passing the same through a cooling coil surrounded by ice at a point close to the tap. See U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,584,184; 4,225,059 5,129,552; 3,865,276; 6,105,825 and 4,437,319 for examples of such a design.
However, cooling by ice is insufficient particularly in warm weather and over an extended period. The heat absorption by the ice is often poor as the melted ice water is warmed by the beer in regions immediately adjacent to the coils, substantially reducing the rate of cooling. The volume of ice is insufficient to maintain proper cooling over long periods such that refrigeration units have sometimes been employed, obviously substantially increasing the cost and complexity of the apparatus.
In an effort to provide adequate cooling, the kegs themselves are sometimes enclosed in a cooled enclosure, obviously greatly increasing the cost and bulkiness of the apparatus, and necessitating extra handling of the heavy kegs to load them into an enclosure.
Furthermore, such cooling apparatus has typically required extensive set up efforts to assemble and connect the various components, i.e. the CO2 pressure tank and regulator, the tap and keg fluid line connections, etc.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an enhanced cooling apparatus capable of rapidly cooling dispensed beer to minimize the tendency for excessive foaming even in warm weather and over extended periods.
It is a further object to provide a compact self contained apparatus to simplify set up, and which has a large capacity for holding crushed ice, to keep the ice from melting over long periods, such that mechanical refrigeration is not required, nor is cooling of the keg itself.